Reconstructing Culture in Historical Explanation: Narratives as Cultural Structure and Practice

The problem of how to access and deploy the explanatory power of culture in historical accounts has long remained vexing. A recent approach, combining and transcending the "culture as structure"/"culture as practice" divide among social historians, puts explanatory focus on the recursivity of meaning, agency, and structure in historical transformation. This article argues that meaning construction is at the nexus of culture, social structure, and social action, and must be the explicit target of investigation into the cultural dimension of historical explanation. Through an empirical analysis of political alliance during the Irish Land War, 1879–1882, I demonstrate that historians can uncover meaning construction by analyzing the symbolic structures and practices of narrative discourse.     

新文化地理学视角下的文化景观研究进展

论文梳理近三十年英美新文化地理学有关文化景观的研究脉络,介绍文化、意义和表征等基本概念。按哲学基础将其分为社会马克思主义影响下的景观面纱、生产研究,语言学影响下的景观文本研究,知识建构论的景观作为梭子,女性主义影响下的景观作为凝视,以及景观想象与身份问题研究。多元化的哲学基础和研究方法开拓了研究视野,也促进了人文地理学研究范式的转变。     

Whose Economy for Whose Culture? Moving Beyond Oppositional Talk in European Debate about Economy and Culture

This paper provides an overview of the economy-culture debate as currently rehearsed within European urban and regional change circles, explores some of the key theoretical inadequacies of this debate and outlines and illustrates one possible way of moving debate forward. The paper begins by identifying the different ways in which economy and culture, and economy-culture articulations, are thought about within this debate and by arguing that what purports to be a debate about articulation collapses in practice into the respective privileging of either culture or economy. Subsequently, after a critique of the "economy-culture as differential logics" argument, we forward what we consider to be the minimal conditions for conjoining economy and culture theoretically. These entail according economy and culture equivalent conceptual standing, centring meaning and seeing meaning and practice as conceptually inseparable. We then illustrate this approach at the level of particularities, using a range of examples that span commodities, "productive" practices and processes of consumption and exchange.     

旅游者符号实践初探——以杭州西湖“西子”诗词为例

旅游者符号实践概念的提出旨在进一步凸显旅游者在旅游吸引物符号建构中的主体性。本文以杭州西湖的"西子"诗词为例,初步探讨了旅游者符号实践概念的基本内涵、理论支撑与研究价值。旅游者符号实践并不是对已有符号记忆的被动接受,而是借助旅游者的亲身体验,不断将其运用到旅游实践中去加以检验、深化和再创造的动态演进过程。符号学理论、实践理论和(身体)现象学理论构成了旅游者符号实践研究的三大理论支撑。符号实践是旅游者符号体验过程中主观与客观、过去与现在、已知与可能、我者与他者、代表物与对象等诸多二元关系的中间环节和关键枢纽,既关系到旅游者的符号体验质量,也与旅游目的地可持续发展息息相关,因而具有一定的研究价值。     

Scenarios of Poiesis: Italian New Media (1994–2004)

This essay attempts to read a number of interventions in Italian new media over the last decade as both a response to and an implicit critique of posthumanism. After a brief discussion of the principal terms in question—new media, interaction, and posthumanism—and a survey of the most important contributors to the discourse of posthumanism in Italy, the essay maps the principal features of Italian media as embodied by the works of three contemporary new media artists. These characteristics include the privileging of a prosthetic model for understanding interaction and more generally the staging of interaction as moments of poiesis. They also include more recently the cancellation of the boundaries between ‘scientific’ and cultural images. The essay insists that by foregrounding the primacy of Italian cultural patterns for determining how meaning is generated in new media, Italian new media artists implicitly critique a reifying tendency among posthuman observers in Italy. The essay concludes with a broad assessment of the importance of poiesis for an Italian technological imaginary.     

论杜维明对“文化中国”的思考

美籍华裔学者杜维明自20世纪90年代以来对"文化中国"的命题进行了思考,提出了诸如"三个意义世界"、"公众知识分子与公民社会"以及"文化中国与儒家传统"等命题.杜维明对"文化中国"的思考有着深厚的历史感和文化蕴涵,不仅显现了当代新儒家"返本开新"的理念,而且也为21世纪中国社会的发展和中国文化的走向从新儒家角度提供了一家之言.尽管杜维明对"文化中国"的论证富有创意,但对这一问题的阐述仍留有广阔的思考空间,它为我们进一步研究当代新儒家在新世纪的文化诉求提供了样本.     

游客慢文化感知维度分异与影响因素研究——以高淳国际慢城为例

本文以深入挖掘慢文化内涵为基础,选取高淳国际慢城为案例地,对游客慢文化感知进行调查,构建游客慢文化感知维度分析模型,探讨游客慢文化感知差异及其影响机制。结果表明：①慢文化是人类社会在创造物质和精神财富过程中体现回归自然、社会节奏放缓、注重生命意义和生活品质的一种生活状态与文化形态;②游客对慢文化的感知存在四个维度,且呈现出慢文化氛围、慢文化产品、慢旅游经济性和慢旅游便捷度的递减关系,表明游客对慢文化的感知相较于显性文化,更注重隐性文化;③游客个体因素和旅游感知距离对慢文化产品、慢文化氛围和慢旅游经济性有影响,感知刺激因素对慢文化产品有显著影响,但各影响因素对慢旅游便捷度感知无影响。     

Agency in the Discursive Condition

This article claims that postmodernity necessarily, and perhaps opportunely, undermines the bases upon which political democracy traditionally has rested; and that therefore some significant work must be done in order to redefine, restore, or otherwise reconfigure democratic values and institutions for a changed cultural condition. This situation presents the opportunity to explore the new options, positive openings, and discursive opportunities that postmodernity presents for political practice; for this the problem of agency provides a focal issue.
The practices of postmodernity, taken together, represent substantial challenges, not just to this or that cherished habit, but to modernity itself and all its corollaries, including its inventions of objectivity, of "the individual" (miserable treasure), and of all the related values (project, capital, consensus and, above all, neutrality) which still underwrite so much of what we do as citizens, consumers, and professionals not to mention as more private persons, parents, and partners. Fortunately, postmodernity does not demolish all our most cherished beliefs, values, and practices; but it does require recognition of how those beliefs, values, and practices actually function and of what alternatives they suppress.     

Working at the ambivalence of race: ethnomimesis and the cancellation of St Paul's Carnival

The ambivalence of race is taken as a starting point in exploring the cancellation of the 2012 St Paul's Carnival, an African-Caribbean arts event in Bristol, England. That race is unstable, that it can be done and undone, has long been a focus of scholarship in social and cultural geography and beyond. This article asks instead how such a fragile state is maintained and with what implications. This necessitates regarding racial ambivalence as an activity; a condition that has to be worked at to be sustained. Ethnomimesis is used to frame these operations of racial ambivalence. Ethnomimesis is the way in which we encounter, stereotype and recognise cultural practices for ourselves and manifest them to others. It demonstrates how different configurations of race are precariously held between the creative possibilities and contingencies of situated cultural practices. Three moments of cancellation are narrated to show how ethnomimetic processes work through multiple formulations of race. This racial ambivalence is central to Carnival's failure. The organisers attempted to produce a performance of African-Caribbean culture that simultaneously denied the histories of racism that motivated the event. Ethnomimesis exposes how the racial ambivalence emergent in these cultural practices both opens and closes the possibilities to belong.     

Is It Always Good to Talk? The Paradoxes of Truth-Telling by Rwandan Youth Born of Rape Committed during the Genocide

Social scientists have extensively debated the virtues, pitfalls, and practical effects of open dialogue and truth-telling versus silence and concealment in global post-conflict endeavours for justice and reconciliation. This article addresses these debates not by endorsing practices of either talk or silence, but by investigating the practical dilemmas faced by Rwandan youth born of rape committed during the 1994 genocide as they find themselves caught in dual cultural imperatives to reveal and to conceal the circumstances of their origins. On the one hand, the post-genocide moment has seen the rise of truth-telling and self-revelation through testimonial practices in settings like post-genocide trials and reconciliation or peace-building workshops. On the other hand, silence and concealment are accepted and expected modes of dealing with hardship in Rwandan cultural practice, and youth participants struggled with the stigma of having been born of genocidal rape. We argue that the youths’ ambivalent and sometimes contradictory moral evaluations of talking about versus hiding their origins highlight the challenges and complexities of identity and belonging in post-genocide Rwanda, since their very existence draws them, their mothers, and their perpetrator-fathers into ongoing relationships. These youths’ lives and experiences speak to larger and powerful conundrums at the heart of what it means to live with legacies of violence, including what should be said or remain unsaid, and how the very opposition between revealing and concealing can be confounded by social and cultural variances in the meaning of “truth.”     

Auditing culture

This article explores the effects of the spread of the principles and practices of the New Public Management (NPM) on the subsidised cultural sector and on cultural policy making in Britain. In particular, changes in the style of public administration that can be ascribed to the NPM will be shown to provide a useful framework to make sense of what has been felt as an “instrumental turn” in British policies for culture between the early 1980s and the present day. The current New Labour Government, as well as the arm's length bodies that distribute public funds for the cultural sector in Britain, are showing an increasing tendency to justify public spending on the arts on the basis of instrumental notions of the arts and culture. In the context of what have been defined as “instrumental cultural policies”, the arts are subsidised in so far as they represent a means to an end rather than an end in itself. In this perspective, the emphasis placed on the potential of the arts to help tackle social exclusion and the role of the cultural sector in place‐marketing and local economic development are typical examples of current trends in British cultural policy making. The central argument purported by this article is that this instrumental emphasis in British cultural policy is closely linked to the changes in the style of public administration that have given rise to the NPM. These new developments have indeed put the publicly funded cultural sector under increasing pressure. In particular, it will be shown how the new stress on the measurement of the arts' impacts in clear and quantifiable ways – which characterises today's “audit society” – has proved a tough challenge for the sector and one that has not been successfully met. The article will conclude by critically considering how the spread of the NPM has affected processes of policy making for the cultural sector, and the damaging effects that such developments may ultimately have on the arts themselves.     

Heritage destruction and cultural rights: insights from Bagan in Myanmar

Recently, the UN Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights has stated that the intentional destruction of cultural heritage is a violation of cultural rights. The Rapporteur examines a timely issue but bases her statement on narrow understandings ‘heritage’ as irreplaceable and ‘destruction’ as ideologically motivated and aggressive. This reinforces hegemonic ideas about heritage and what constitutes its destruction. In this article, I discuss the case of Bagan in Myanmar to illustrate the limitations of the Rapporteur’s statement. In Bagan, whether and how ‘heritage’ should be protected has been the topic of controversy. By implication what is – or is not – considered intentional destruction is contested. Ambiguity about the meaning of cultural rights, the dissonant nature of heritage, the subjectivity of destruction, and complex multi-layered motivations behind ‘destructive’ practices make overarching statement about the destruction of cultural heritage and cultural rights violations too bold and call for more nuance and contextualised research.     

Networked practices of intangible urban heritage: the changing public role of Dutch heritage professionals

This study examines the changing roles of heritage professionals by focusing on the participatory practices of intangible urban heritage. Developments towards democratisation in the heritage sector led to a growing expectation that heritage professionals would work with local publics. This democratisation is manifested in (1) the use of digital media for grassroots heritage practices, (2) the broader scope of what is defined as heritage, and (3) a focus on communities in UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. Heritage professionals are thus challenged to develop inclusive heritage practices, particularly in cities, which are characterised by a dynamic nature and cultural diversity. In this article, I analyse how urban heritage organisations and professionals have responded to these developments. Drawing on interviews and a qualitative content analysis of these organisations’ policy documents, I examine the ways in which heritage professionals reconsider their public role through what I define as networked practices of intangible heritage. This concept captures the networked structure in which heritage professionals increasingly work, and also demonstrates how heritage is given meaning through public practices that take place in both the physical and virtual realms of contemporary cities.     

Villagers’ agency in the Intangible Cultural Heritage designation of a Korean village ritual

This paper examines how the villagers of Pams?m village in Seoul acted as agents in configuring their own cultural identity which explores issues concerning Korea’s Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) designation system. It delves in detail how villagers practice their ritual of Pams?m Pugundang kut ? amidst the complex process of continuity and change as a way of sustaining and promoting collective village identity. By examining the implications of this cultural practices in contemporary society, this paper ultimately raises the question of who constitutes the true legatee of traditional culture of Pams?m village. The cultural practice of the Pams?m Pugundang kut carried out by the villagers of Pams?m can be interpreted not merely as a critique of the dynamics of political and cultural heritage, but the reconstruction of villager’s identity through the creation and continuation of their long village history. This study provides a useful case in examining a village community which describes in detail how the subject of this study constructs their cultural identity and faces the complex issues concerning Korea’s ICH designation system.     

Gender and daily mobility in a New Zealand city, 1920–1960

Although it is widely accepted that transport—like other social practices—is gendered, the concept of gender used in transport research is often one‐dimensional, with the focus on gendered variations in behaviour rather than on gendered meaning and identities. In this paper, I develop a more complex and multi‐stranded way of approaching the issue of gender and transport (or rather, daily mobility). A case study of a neighbourhood in the New Zealand city of Dunedin in the early decades of last century is presented to explore how the practices of daily mobility constituted gender. A three‐part concept of gender is developed as a basis for analysis: gender as a pattern of social relations, a cultural system of meaning and a component of personal identity. This is then used to analyse a collection of sixty oral histories. The period 1920–1960 is particularly interesting; in these decades extensive and widely used public transport systems (notably electric trams) shared urban streets with bicycles and pedestrians, and the emerging private modes of motorcycle and motor car. As new transport technologies were taken up, they offered the opportunity for new social practices to be formed around their use, for cultural meanings to be assigned to the technologies and for embodied individual subjectivities to be constructed. I argue that we can usefully interpret the shifting patterns of transport use through the lens of gender, and that we can come to understand the process by which gender is constructed by attention to everyday trip‐making and presence on the street.     

胡适关于中国近代文化转型的几个重要观念

在令大多数中国人长期困惑的中西文化的关系问题上,胡适化与看来同自己的固有文化大不相同的现代世界新文化泰然相处,并怎样以最有效的方式吸收现代的新文化,使它能同我们的固有文化相一致、相协调和继续发展.胡适指出,各民族的文化本质上是有同一性的,是可以互相借鉴的.因此,不存在所谓东方文化是精神的,西方文化是物质的这种大分别.胡适又指出,历来各民族的文化交流的常态都是自由选择,各取所需.胡适还强调指出,任何文化都有其自身的"根本保守性",也就是所谓"文化本位".这个"文化本位"实际上就是那无数无数的人民.基于这样的认识,就能够以一种开放的文化观念来处理中国文化与世界新文化的关系,化解种种困惑,较好地解决近代文化转型中遇到的各种问题.     

‘A separate people’? Some directions for comparative research on medieval women

Research to date has often positioned women of minority cultures as a separate group. They were, in many cases, twice removed — both from the men in their communities and from the majority communities within which they lived. This essay discusses the benefits of including these women, both as separate groups and as part of cross cultural comparison and points to the possible contribution of such studies. In the three parts of this article I propose different strategies for studying minority and majority women using examples from the sources on Jews in medieval Europe. In the first section, the article explores how to learn from similarities and differences between majority and minority practices, focusing on wet-nursing practices and medical care. The second part of the article proposes examining how ordinary people themselves perceived the ‘religiousness’ of certain everyday practices and set their own boundaries to what they were and were not willing to do. In this case, I suggest that more attention be paid to the way medieval women (and men) turned daily actions into religious proclamations and how in some cases they involved members of other religions in what seem to be internal affairs. This, in turn, leads to a final, larger comparative question taken up in the final part of the article: how do the larger trajectories of transformations in women's roles and rights compare across different religious cultural traditions.     

A New Diplomatic History and the Networks of Spanish Diplomacy in the Baroque Era

Diplomatic history has undergone profound alterations during the last century. According to the old model built by Mattingly in 1955, diplomatic history was the analysis of international and political relations within a national context. Subsequent studies analysed how diplomacy evolved towards a more institutionalised and professional scheme (established in eighteenth-century European diplomacy). However, was this conclusion an inevitable one for Early Modern and Baroque diplomacy? This essay intends to retrace the steps that have been taken towards a new history of diplomacy, by early-modern historians in general, and by Spanish historiography in particular, as well as to assess the idea that what made a difference for Spanish Baroque diplomacy was the extent of networks that allowed cultural transference, the capacity to influence others, rather than the institutional extent of connections and practices. Which people or processes promoted the circulation of ideas, information, and culture, within and outside the Spanish monarchy, during the seventeenth century? This question will form the focus of the second part of this essay, in which the author analyses several specific cases of Spanish ambassadors in Europe: their networks of communication, their building of stereotypes, their informal diplomatic practices, and their use of ceremonial practices.     

Cultural effects of authenticity: contested heritage practices in China

In this study, I analyse how the Chinese Government imposes the concept of authenticity on local heritage practices in the process of heritage nomination, conservation and management. Rather than discussing authenticity as an objective criterion, I approach authentication as a social process in the heritage discourse that impacts on local cultural practice. Through illustrating two cases in China, I propose three cultural effects of authentication on local heritage practices, namely spatial separation, emotional banishment and value shifting. Moreover, the heritage practices in China have created space for dynamic negotiations between local and global value systems. When the concept of authenticity is imposed on local heritage practices by heritage agencies, local communities are not passive recipients; rather, they consume, contest and negotiate the concept of authenticity in various ways.     

Moon,mud, and cell phones: geographies of race and construction of difference through normalization

How does the meaning of space emerge and get negotiated when individuals of diverse backgrounds interact with each other? Studies reporting that African Americans tend not to spend time in outdoor space attribute this finding to limited access to resources, cultural values, degree of assimilation to mainstream practices, discrimination in outdoor space, or a perception that outdoor recreational space is “white space”. Little research has addressed how such meanings relate to other meanings attached to outdoor space, let alone how this happens through interactions between people with different views on outdoor space. This article, based on interviews and participant observation of college students on an alternative break trip from the Northeastern U.S. to New Mexico in 2014, shows how students of various backgrounds experienced nature differently, how differences were articulated and explained, and how they subverted normalization processes that render not “being in tune with nature” as deficiency. Suggesting that geographies of race are fluid and influenced by individuals’ agency, this article calls for encouraging students to examine the ways their subject positions have shaped their experiences and challenge cultural bias in what is deemed universally desirable.